Making the Tea Party Set- first experiments and photographs

Today i began creating my first scene for the YCN brief- the things i had to keep in mind were:

my target audience of girls aged 5-9& their parents- so the scene needs to be child friendly and fun and as its aimed at girls i think a certain amount of pretty wouldn’t go amiss 🙂

keeping to the original story of Alice in wonderland- but with new and interesting ways of expressing the scenes and ideas

a fresh approach to the story

include a use of kitsch & my own way of working, in order to represent my ideas

I am creating this scene using 3D found objects and kitsch objects combined with my own drawing & photography. I have gathered a selection of kitschy dollhouse miniatures as mentioned in my previous post, and i have also created a small character version of Alice, using a combination of photography and drawing. Yet i am still unsure of whether to represent characters physically at all, because the image of Alice is so well known, i am inclined to not show any characters in the scenes and allow the scenes to speak for themselves and children to imagine the characters they know so well interacting with the scenes whilst reading, thus allowing them to make decisions about how characters would look thus giving them the chance to stretch their imaginations.

To create this first scene i created a dining table using some kitsch fabric with fluffy trim, a variety of different chairs and many different tea sets, 2 had been chosen based upon their victorian floral patterns because of their relevance to the time of Lewis Carroll when the story was originally written, and the pastel coloured one is to add the kitsch i love to add into my work. I also decided the chairs should not just be sat around the table, so some are hung from the trees to give that extra surreal touch. The story dictates that the table was heavily laden with tea things, and this i have adhered too by creating a table thats very full of colourful tea things and cakes. the chairs range from a brightly coloured tacky pink armchair coated in pearlised paint, gingham chairs and a rocking chair, and a chair made from a cotton reel with a comfy cushion on top. I have tried to play with scale in this scene, because the story of Alice in wonderland suggests a surreal take on scale, the plants are large and overbearing on the scene, as are the leaves on the floor and the size of the flowers.

I really enjoyed creating this, i created this scene outside because i liked the idea of a realistic flooring that my target audience will recognize, because these connections to real life objects will make the fantasy world all that easier to enter when looking at the illustrations.

For lighting, this is something i would like to revisit in order to shoot the final illustration for editing because in the story, there is no mention of the time of day; therefore i’d like to experiment with setting the scenes at night time because this has not been done previously and i would like to try and create some “magic” at night time with the use of LED lights and doll house lights.

I have also been considering the necessary image sizes for following the brief which are 270mm (H) and 215mm so i have been creating some images to this size to see how it looks 🙂

below are some edited/ unedited pictures of my progress today, i’ve experimented with a range of editing techniques and filters/ layers to see whether a very surreal take on my images would still appeal to my target audience and i will ask my peers advice on this thursday during tutorials.

These above are the unedited images and progress images of testing out different places in the garden for setting up the scene 🙂 Below are the edited images: